I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Domo arigato, Swiss Miss

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

What’s the kids’ TV we grew up with? For Matt, who grew up in Switzerland, it was a surprising number of TV series based on European children’s books but made in Japan. (Okay, this is not a trailer so much as it is the title sequence of Heidi, Girl of the Alps in the Japanese original, I know, but what can you do.)

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Criterion Corner: Something Wild (#563)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a conventional yuppie who, if you look at him from the right angle, reveals a streak of disaffection with his life bumps into a free-spirited young woman. She introduces him to the wild side of life, and they embark on a whirlwind romance. All together now: can you say “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”?

If you rolled your eyes at this, rest assured: that was pretty much my first reaction to Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild – so much so that after about half an hour I ejected the Blu-ray and watched something else instead. For those first 20-30 minutes, I felt more and more that I really didn’t need yet another take on that particular well-worn cliché. Charlie Driggs (Jeff Daniels) and Lulu (Melanie Griffith), as she calls herself to begin with, weren’t endearing to me: I found them and their idea of what breaking free from convention looked like grating. It’s one thing to watch teenagers who believe they’re the first ever to break free from the bonds of social mores; it’s quite another to watch two supposedly grown-up people behaving like those teenagers. There’s something to it that is smug and self-satisfied and, frankly, a bit boring.

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